The Marvelous in the Work of Three Yiddish Travel Writers

• In Event: On the Move: Travel, Migration, and Modern Jewish LIteratures

Abstract

In the field of Yiddish travel books three authors stand out as particularly prolific -- Peretz Hirshbein (1880-1948) , Hayyim Shoshkes (1891-1964)and Markos Paryszewski (1891-1970). The oeuvre of the three shows very little in common and reading through their work it would be very difficult to claim any single characteristic to Yiddish travel writing. Indeed, if the idea of the marvelous plays a substantial role in travel narratives, and there are moments in history in which the marvelous has a location whether real or imagined, this is certainly not the case for these three. For Hirshbein, the marvelous has to do with landscape, place and nature and its locations were throughout the world including the US. For Shoshkes landscape is very much subservient to people. For him, narrative and anecdote are tightly intermingled especially since personages in his accounts are sometimes people he knows from previous trips or from earlier in his life, or because an encounter with an amusing and/or extraordinary individual provides the sense of marvel intended to hold the readers’ interests. Like Hirshbein, Shoshkes was remarkably peripatetic, though unlike Hirshbein he almost never wrote about the US nor anything relatively close to home. And, unlike Hirshbein, often enough the subject of his narratives were Jews or people of some significance to Jews such as déclassé Polish nobility in exile in Africa or South America after World War II, and living in locations one could scarcely have imagined. Paryzewski ‘s narratives are in a way a hybrid of Hirshbein’s and Shoshkes’s. The locales and interactions are probably the most exotic that appear within Yiddish travel narratives with his signature work an exploration of the Incan highlands within Peru. Oddly enough, the Jewish component plays a pivotal role in the narrative. Moreover, rather than highlighting the exotic or the marvelous, it serves to de-exoticize it: the native populations, murdered and dispossessed by Europeans are an analog to the Jews of Europe suffering a similar fate precisely when his book appeared.

Author

• Jack Kugelmass, University of Florida